LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #644, Tuesday, (05/28/2024)
LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #644, Tuesday, (05/28/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
LLAW’s NUCLEAR ISSUES & COMMENTS, Tuesday, (05/28/2024)
There were quite a few other articles of value in today’s TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (listed below), but when I saw this one, I couldn’t resist. “So”, I thought to myself, “this is how the powerful, rich, and famous expect to escape nuclear doomsday on planet Earth.”
I had often wondered if the ‘elite’ of us might have a way to ‘take it with ‘em’ after their tour of greed on Earth, other than common death, and perhaps Mars is where they plan to go. But according to Musk, the exodus may not be ready for another 20 years, so the question is, will the “starships” be feasible in time to save even the elite? Certainly, given the problems with ‘all things nuclear’ and global warming that we have today, it is a huge gamble and there is no guarantee. ~llaw
The article is incredibly interesting, and very much worth reading whether or not you have a dim view of Elon Musk . . .
FORBESBUSINESSAEROSPACE & DEFENSE
Elon Musk’s Starship Ark Aimed At Helping Humanity Survive Nuclear War
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Writing at the intersection of space and defense, focus on SpaceX, Mars' 1st cosmopolis.
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May 28, 2024,06:26am EDT
SpaceX is racing to conduct the next test flight of its incredibly advanced Starship - the Titan-size “space ark” designed to shuttle humans to a terraformed Mars - even as the specter of nuclear war spreads its shadows across the Earth.
After Moscow’s ambassador to Washington personally warned him that use of the SpaceX satellite system by Ukraine’s resistance could spark Russia to respond with tactical nuclear weapons, Elon Musk has been stepping up tests of the Starship spacecraft, as if he is trying to outpace an atomic time bomb.
Musk told his hand-picked biographer, Walter Isaacson, that Ambassador Anatoly Antonov had directly threatened him that Moscow would repel any Ukrainian assault on occupied Crimea, where the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet is headquartered, with nuclear arms.
Even as Musk engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Antonov, and with Ukraine’s leadership, to avert any nuclear battlefront, the commander of the SpaceX Starship project has doubled down on the super-capsule’s development.
While his Plan A is to foster the peaceful sphere of space flight to the International Space Station, carrying NASA, allied and Roscosmos astronauts to the outpost aboard his Dragon spacecraft, Musk also has an interplanetary Plan B: creating a second foundation for human civilization on weapons-free Mars, far from the atomic missile silos positioned across the northern hemisphere of the Earth.
The creator of SpaceX - the globe’s first independent space superpower - sketched out his vision of Mars as an off-world sanctuary during a fantastical overview he presented recently at his Starbase launch center, the massive rocket skunkworks he’s expanding, at bullet-speed, right off the turquoise seas of the Gulf of Mexico.
Musk said that as the penumbra of war darkens the fate of the Earth, “There's a high urgency to making life multi-planetary.”
“The overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet - Mars is the only option really - and to do that ideally before World War III.”
“Obviously I'm not talking about abandoning Earth or anything like that and we want Earth to be as good as possible for as long as possible,” he added, “but there are certain things that may be outside of our control.”
“So we want to just get Mars to be a self-sustaining civilization as quickly as possible.”
Rapidly building a haven for humans on Mars is imperative, SpaceX’s chief rocket designer said, “if there's something that takes out Earth - like let's say there's a World War III global thermonuclear warfare.”
Even an advanced lunar colony wouldn’t survive as a refuge for humanity, Musk said, because nuclear warriors would “probably throw a few nukes at the Moon.”
“It's way harder to shoot Mars with nuclear,” Musk said, as if narrating a film that he has replayed countless times in his head. “Mars would see it coming and probably have some time to stop the inbound missiles.”
Around the same time that Vladimir Putin’s emissary to Washington issued the ultimatum to Musk on the use of atomic arms in Ukraine, another Kremlin lieutenant began threatening at UN gatherings to shoot down SpaceX Starlink satellites that are beaming broadband internet coverage into the occupied nation.
At the same time, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency has reported the deployment of advanced fighter-bombers and missile systems to destroy Starlink transceivers used along the front lines of the conflict.
The Kremlin is apparently preparing to extend its brinkmanship in the heavens by stationing a nuclear-armed spacecraft in orbit, designed to perpetually circle the Earth and challenge the satellites of NATO nations aiding Ukraine. That might be setting the stage for a showdown between Russian and allied ASATs, which in turn could spark a wider conflict, say defense experts across American universities and think tanks.
While some critics have derided Elon Musk’s visionary blueprints to transform Mars into a second-world sanctum for Homo sapiens, SpaceX’s designer-inventor is not alone in proposing that celestial settlements could guarantee humanity’s future even if the home planet is destroyed via nuclear warfare.
In one of his final interviews with the BBC, the world-shaking astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned: “We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses.”
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.”
Yet Professor Hawking, author of the global blockbuster book “A Brief History of Time,” tempered his doomsday oracle by stating: “By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
While outlining his prophecy, Hawking forecast it could take up to a century to begin founding independent colonies in space.
But Musk has proposed creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars within just 20 years, via flotillas of Starship arks that depart Earth every two years, when the planets are optimally aligned. Each Starship will accommodate 100 settlers, and 10,000 flights will foster a flourishing SpaceX cosmopolis of one million first-generation Martians.
“You know the giant Starship Factory that we're building is obviously key to that,” Musk said during the Starbase talk. “And the launch sites that we're building here and at the Cape [Cape Canaveral Space Force Station] and elsewhere in the future will be key to that.”
The next-generation technology, colossal size, high-speed evolution and full reusability of the Starship all represent a planet-changing revolution in space flight - one that will be chronicled in history books for centuries into the future, says Professor Kip Hodges, the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, one of the leading American space studies centers.
In terms of rocketing robots and humans, satellites, servers and other building blocks of a hyper-tech society to Mars, SpaceX’s Starship is absolutely without rival, he told me in an interview.
The first wave of astronauts will live inside and conduct research from Starship outposts that begin to crisscross the orange-red dunes of Mars, Professor Hodges says, as clusters of arks form citadels and then cities beneath robotically assembled geodesic domes.
Although Elon Musk hasn’t yet outlined any scheme to safeguard birds and giraffes, dolphins and Dalmatians by transporting genetic samplings of every species known to Earth aboard his arks, he has set out a masterplan to transfigure the now-frozen Red Planet into a vibrant new proto-Eden.
“We can warm up Mars and we can densify the atmosphere,” he predicted during the spellbinding Starbase talk. “There would be a liquid ocean on about 40 percent of the surface so we could make it an Earth-like planet long-term.”
“Elon Musk has rightly identified nuclear weapons as a continuing threat to humanity,” says Tim Wright, Treaty Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the group that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its central role in promulgating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Thousands of warheads “are still in missile silos and on submarines, ready to be launched at any moment,” Wright told me in an interview. “A thermonuclear war could render much of Earth permanently uninhabitable.”
“It's important to focus on eliminating the weapons,” Wright says.
With his tremendous wealth and influence - the SpaceX founder now has 184.9 million followers on X/Twitter - Elon Musk could do more to aid the global movement to completely abolish nuclear weaponry from the face of the Earth, he adds.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Tuesday, (05/28/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Pentagon Playing Catch Up After Years Neglecting Nuclear Protection
National Defense Magazine
... nuclear weapons — talking about it almost as if it's commonplace. ... “If we're trying to solve all the problems at once, yeah, it's not a lot of ...
Advocates push for compensation for St. Louis-area radioactive waste victims as deadline looms
STLPR
All Things Considered. Next Up: 6:00 PM ... nuclear weapons program. The months-long fight ... nuclear waste in the St. Louis region. Despite efforts ...
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program Sparks Debate Over Money - and Need - The Cipher Brief
The Cipher Brief
... things we need to do tactically and operationally. ... And certainly, the next year will inform us on how we can get at how to balance all of that.
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Russia to build a small nuclear power plant in Uzbekistan | AP News
AP News
According to Russian media, the two countries were earlier discussing building a nuclear power plant of a larger capacity — of 2.4 gigawatts. Putin ...
Russia set to build SMR nuclear power plant in Uzbekistan
World Nuclear News
An agreement between Uzbekistan and Russia will see a six-unit small modular reactor nuclear power plant built in the Jizzakh region of Uzbekistan ...
Russia to build a small nuclear power plant in Uzbekistan - Yahoo
Yahoo
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Uzbekistan leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev held talks on Monday and signed a number of agreements aimed at ...
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
KI's Specialist Centre Excels in Radiation Emergency Medicine | Mirage News
Mirage News
In particular, the war in Ukraine has induced fears of nuclear plant emergencies and even of a possible use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons.
New Caledonia state of emergency to be lifted, says Paris | SaltWire
SaltWire
... emergency would end as planned in the French ... Lifting the state of emergency ... 4. Russia not currently planning to restart Zaporizhzhia nuclear power ...
Youm-e-Takbeer: the day PAEC made the nation proud - Opinion - Business Recorder
Business Recorder
As per international best practices in the field of nuclear power, Emergency Preparedness Measures are well in place for timely intervention at these ...
Nuclear War
NEWS
Russia Claims NATO Is Planning Nuclear Strikes - Newsweek
Newsweek
In parallel with the increased nuclear rhetoric, the Kremlin and its propagandists have framed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a proxy war ...
Elon Musk's Starship Ark Aimed At Helping Humanity Survive Nuclear War - Forbes
Forbes
SpaceX's Starship is a Titan-size "space ark" designed to shuttle settlers to Mars, an off-world sanctuary enabling humanity to survive a nuclear war
War in Ukraine Might Just Kickstart a Nuclear Energy Renaissance - Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Climate change is supposed to be the catalyst for the long-elusive US nuclear power renaissance, but the war in Ukraine may provide the motivation ...
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Pentagon Playing Catch Up After Years Neglecting Nuclear Protection
National Defense Magazine
The last two Defense Department Nuclear Posture Reviews have acknowledged the heightened threat of nuclear warfare and recommended more training ...
Is Putin Preparing for Nuclear War? - RealClearDefense
RealClearDefense
... threats to use nuclear weapons. And he is now ... war between the major powers at any level risks escalation to mass destruction. ... nuclear warfare, ...
Russia Claims NATO Is Planning Nuclear Strikes - Newsweek
Newsweek
... nuclear weapons after what Moscow said were threats from the West. ... war between Moscow ... Israel at War Vladimir Putin Russia-Ukraine War Donald Trump.